Beat News: May 10 1995

1. This is still unconfirmed, but I hear that Brad Pitt and Sean Penn have been picked for the two lead roles in the new film of "On The Road." I'm pretty happy with the choice of Sean Penn, who I think is an excellent actor. As for Brad Pitt, I don't really know his work and couldn't possibly tell him apart from Ethan Hawke or any of the rest of those guys. I assume Sean Penn will play Dean Moriarty, and if that's the case then the film might actually work. Dean (the character based on Neal Cassady) is the critical role -- all Sal Paradise (the character Kerouac based on himself) has to do is sit in the passenger seat looking poignant, and I assume Brad Hawke can handle that.

2. A very nice person named Sherri has endeavored to finally create a comprehensive Beat bibliography for Literary Kicks. She is now beginning to work on author-specific bibliographies, some of which will be written by other contributors. Sherri and I would like these bibliographies to be as complete as possible, so please check the first one out and send her any info you think she might be missing.

3. There's a fun new radio show dedicated to online culture being produced in New York, and they were nice enough to call me for a phone interview this week. I probably got picked because the guy who runs the show -- his name is Galinsky -- is a young poet from Brooklyn, and Galinsky knows Beats. The show is called Pseudo Online Radio, and it's on WEVD 1050 AM on Thursday nights at 11. Here's their logo:

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Prompted by Tom McCarthy's trendy new novel C, AbeBooks presents a tableau of one-letter (or two-letter) books. It's a lot of fun to look at. Of course, I'm an old school techie, so to me C will always be the title of a classic book by Kernighan and Ritchie.

John Osborne's signature work is 'Look Back in Anger', which opened in 1956 and gave the "Angry Young Men" their name. It's the story of a fuming, flannel-shirt wearing London bloke named Jimmy who slaves away at a candy stand all day and plays hot trad jazz saxophone all night.

Magic Trip, a new film by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, tells the story of novelist Ken Kesey's 1964 road trip across America in a painted bus with a troupe of fanciful hippies and legendary beatnik Neal Cassady at the wheel.

While we're watching counterculture moments on television from the 1960s, here's something else I just stumbled across: an appearance by the joyful jazz composer and performer David Amram on the kid's show Wonderama. He demonstrates his favorite world-music instruments, and naturally leads a jam session with the kids, who are way into it.

I hope my pick for the most significant book of 2013 will surprise you. It surprises me. For one thing, it's not exactly a book. It wasn't published in 2013. And I've never mentioned it on Litkicks before.

Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, a French-Canadian child on March 12, 1922 in working-class Lowell, Massachusetts. Ti Jean spoke a local dialect of French called joual before he learned English. The youngest of three children, he was heartbroken when his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine.

Ti Jean was an intense and serious child, devoted to Memere (his mother) and constantly forming important friendships with other boys, as he would continue to do throughout his life. He was driven to create stories from a young age, inspired first by the mysterious radio show 'The Shadow,' and later by the fervid novels of Thomas Wolfe, the writer he would model himself after ...

Like the French Impressionist artists of Paris, the Beat writers were a small group of close friends first, and a movement later. The term "Beat Generation" gradually came to represent an entire period in time, but the entire original Beat Generation in literature was small enough to have fit into a couple of cars (at times this nearly happened).

Search form

Prompted by Tom McCarthy's trendy new novel C, AbeBooks presents a tableau of one-letter (or two-letter) books. It's a lot of fun to look at. Of course, I'm an old school techie, so to me C will always be the title of a classic book by Kernighan and Ritchie.

John Osborne's signature work is 'Look Back in Anger', which opened in 1956 and gave the "Angry Young Men" their name. It's the story of a fuming, flannel-shirt wearing London bloke named Jimmy who slaves away at a candy stand all day and plays hot trad jazz saxophone all night.

Magic Trip, a new film by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, tells the story of novelist Ken Kesey's 1964 road trip across America in a painted bus with a troupe of fanciful hippies and legendary beatnik Neal Cassady at the wheel.

While we're watching counterculture moments on television from the 1960s, here's something else I just stumbled across: an appearance by the joyful jazz composer and performer David Amram on the kid's show Wonderama. He demonstrates his favorite world-music instruments, and naturally leads a jam session with the kids, who are way into it.

I hope my pick for the most significant book of 2013 will surprise you. It surprises me. For one thing, it's not exactly a book. It wasn't published in 2013. And I've never mentioned it on Litkicks before.

Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, a French-Canadian child on March 12, 1922 in working-class Lowell, Massachusetts. Ti Jean spoke a local dialect of French called joual before he learned English. The youngest of three children, he was heartbroken when his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine.

Ti Jean was an intense and serious child, devoted to Memere (his mother) and constantly forming important friendships with other boys, as he would continue to do throughout his life. He was driven to create stories from a young age, inspired first by the mysterious radio show 'The Shadow,' and later by the fervid novels of Thomas Wolfe, the writer he would model himself after ...

Like the French Impressionist artists of Paris, the Beat writers were a small group of close friends first, and a movement later. The term "Beat Generation" gradually came to represent an entire period in time, but the entire original Beat Generation in literature was small enough to have fit into a couple of cars (at times this nearly happened).